The ‘customer hello’ and other workplace phenomena

Staff Picks for Invertebrates,
by Zoe Dickinson 

Gananoque: Guernica Editions, 2026
$22.95 / 9781778490286

Reviewed by Isabella Ranallo

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Staff Picks for Invertebrates is a bookseller’s musings on life laced with nature imagery. With her debut full-length collection, Zoe Dickinson paints an impressionistic day-in-the-life with her poems. There is a real lived-in sense of both setting and speaker as the reader is introduced to the poet’s job at a bookstore, scenes of a daily commute, dog walks on the beach, and both wacky and heartfelt interactions with customers. The majority of the poems are written in free verse and their content is largely narrative. There’s not much experimentation with form, but what is notable is both the internal and external world that is gradually mapped out. Only one specific person could write this collection.

Dickinson is a longtime manager at Victoria-based Russell Books. That position clearly informs her collection. From amusing anecdotes about customers to a versatile range of literary references, Dickinson optimizes her experience as scaffolding for her poems. One of these is “where not to pick up chicks at a bookstore,” which walks through the different sections of Russell Books—sci-fi, gardening, self-help, romance, and more. It simultaneously establishes the speaker’s sense of humour and deep knowledge of their workspace.

I’ve also had the privilege to work in a bookstore, and plenty of the slice-of-life details in Dickinson’s poems resonated with me. The customer who makes painfully vague inquiries in “context” (“she approaches the customer service desk and says: / funny beavers / just that, and waits / I search for a clue: / is that the title of a book?”) will be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in retail. In “everywhere at once,” the speaker’s horror when she accidentally greets her coworker with a “customer hello” gave me a chuckle in particular. I am definitely guilty of having a ‘customer hello’ myself, and just as guilty of accidentally unleashing it on a coworker (or my mother) after a long day’s work.

At the same time, these loving tongue-in-check drawings of customers can verge into something deeper. In “customer service,” one customer repeatedly phones the bookstore armed with an arsenal of questions easily answered by Google. The speaker chooses to put aside any irritation they might feel and continues to respond to the customer, reflecting that they likely live in “an empty house / where there’s no one to call / and nobody drops by for tea.” This is a strong flip from the initial portrait of a tiresome customer to a keen moment of human empathy. 

It got even more of an emotional reaction out of me because I recognized the scenario’s reality. When I started at my bookstore, my coworkers told me that there were a handful of regulars—seniors, primarily—who found the majority of their social interaction between the shelves. I’d later spot my coworkers greeting these customers by name and engaging them in conversation. It speaks to the humanity—and importance—of bookstores, which is something I imagine Dickinson wants to underline. 

Another aspect that makes Staff Picks stand out is its recurring nature imagery punctuated by sea life, via scientific terminology in particular. Words such as “moss landing aeolid” pop up in poems. Again, this makes sense when consulting the poet’s bio. Dickinson was the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series for three years, and is still a board member today. Combined with the bookstore setting, this makes for some distinctive poems. 

A standout is “tree whisper,” which maps out the bookstore sales floor as a living forest. From “prun[ing]” shelves of books that aren’t selling to describing the re-shelving process as “autumn leaves, placed back on stems,” the metaphor is thoughtful and thoroughly developed. Shelves are branches, books are leaves, and the words on pages are whispering trees. The metaphor grows even more intriguing when the reader considers that the books and potentially the shelves they stand on are literally made of trees. Perhaps Dickinson is nudging us to consider the ecological implications of this.

The bookstore setting, the poet’s lived experience, and the nature imagery are what make Staff Picks distinctive. But it is not always cohesive. The collection opens with “I’d like to start by acknowledging,” a play on First Nations land acknowledgements (that first appeared in Intertidal, the poet’s 2022 chapbook). Dickinson crafts an intriguing conversation with colonialism from the perspective of a white settler saving to buy real estate “even though I know / it doesn’t belong to the current owners.” The poem pokes at the potential of land acknowledgements to slip into lip service “as though saying it out loud / will somehow make me less complicit,” simultaneously feeding into this trend then immediately calling it out. It’s a hard one to pin down. Dickinson does not go on to tackle similar hot topics in subsequent poems, making it stick out somewhat. 

There are a handful of shorter poems in the collection, some of which are just two lines long. The “commute” series often fall into this category, but those work because their focus is immortalizing one distinctive character or landmark on the poet’s daily commute. This brevity doesn’t land in other poems, such as “January,” which can read as unrealized. Moments such as these can cause the reader to reevaluate what the book is trying to do or say.

Even if some poems lend an unfocused quality to the overall collection, other poems still stand their own. One of these stronger poems is “where I belong.” We’ve been introduced to memorable customers and had Russell Books mapped out for us, but here, a self-portrait of sorts is offered. The speaker compares themselves to “books face-out / spread thin” on a shelf and muses on the staff they’ve seen come and go, saying “nobody stays in retail / except me.” The piece ends with the speaker calling the bookstore their home and hoping that somewhere in the store is a book that’s been there for as long as they have. They conclude that they don’t “belong anywhere else.” Poignant and painfully honest, “where I belong” fuses the purpose of the collection together. 

Other signals of the poet’s work environment are the literary references that pepper the collection. Appearing as quotes that precede some poems or directly alluded to within the poems themselves, Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, and the original poet named Dickinson (Emily) are some of the big names that appear. When I was assigned to review this book, I had the thought that Dickinson was a last name that came with a significant amount of pressure for a poet, so kudos to the author for engaging with that poetical ancestor directly.

Staff Picks for Invertebrates will catch the eye of book lovers, retail workers, and tree huggers. That’s an eclectic group of people, and underlines the uniqueness of the author’s lived experience that manifests in her poems. Dickinson offers a debut that is confident in its voice and builds a world populated by bookshelves and sea urchins. If you’re a poet who works in customer service, this might be the book for you.

[Editor’s note: Zoe Dickinson’s next appearance will be at Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria on May 22. She’s also a featured author at the Denman Island Writers Festival, July 17-19.]

At age four, Isabella Ranallo stole a sheet of her mother’s office paper to write the first page of a novel about ten kids stranded on a desert island. This led—with some twists and turns, like any good story—to graduating with a Creative Writing and History BA from VIU, where she was awarded the Barry Broadfoot Award for Journalism/Creative Non-Fiction and the Pat Bevan Scholarship for Poetry. Since graduation, Isabella has worked at the Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre as a research assistant; she currently freelances at Granville Island Publishing. Her work has appeared in the BC Federation of Writers’ WordWorks magazine. [Editor’s note: Isabella has reviewed recent books by Lacey Jones, Tara Hodgson, PP Wong, Thomas Mark McKinnon and Arleen Paré for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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